This course is designed for every IT professional in your organization. In this course we cover the top techniques that will show any attendee how to research and write professional quality reports, and how to create outstanding presentation materials. Attendees will also get a crash course on advanced public speaking skills.

Writing reports is a task that many IT professionals struggle with, sometimes from the perspective of writing the report and other times from the perspective of having to read someone else's report! In the morning material we cover step by step how to work through the process of identifying critical ideas, how to properly research them, how to develop a strong argument in written form, and how to put it all down on paper. We also discuss some of the most common mistakes that can negatively impact the reception of your work and show how to avoid them. Attendees can expect to see the overall quality of their reports improve significantly as a result of this material.

After writing a meaningful report, it is not uncommon to find that we must present the key findings from that report before an audience, whether that audience is our department, upper management, or perhaps even the entire organization. How do you transform an excellent report into a powerful presentation? We will work through a process that works to either condense a report into a presentation or can even be used to write a presentation from scratch that communicates your important thoughts in a meaningful and interesting way.

Writing the presentation is only half of the battle, though. How do you stand up in front of a group of five or even five thousand and speak? We will share tips and techniques of top presenters that you can apply to give the best presentation of your career. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to work up and deliver a short presentation to the class followed by some personal feedback from one of SANS' top speakers.

Professionals like you have come to expect the very best in materials and presentation quality from SANS courses. In this course we have distilled the elements that go into writing high-quality material and the skills required to be a top public speaker from nearly two decades of experience. For years students have asked for a course on writing and delivering presentations; this course is the answer!

Students can bring any type of laptop with some type of word processing software and any type of presentation tool that will allow them to present a few slides to the class. There is no specific requirement for a particular operating system or office suite.

If you have additional questions about the laptop specifications, please contact laptop_prep@sans.org.

Author Statement

Author Statement

In my view this course fills a number of very real needs. For several years now I've included sections on how to run meetings in some of my audit and management courses. Invariably students ask, "When is SANS going to write a course on how to do presentations??"

Another thing that many students struggle with is writing an effective whitepaper. Whitepapers are powerful tools that can be used to increase your name recognition as an IT professional. They're also the prime requirement for a GIAC Gold student or SANS STI master's degree candidate.

Finally, there are several courses that deal with issues that can lead to a GIAC certified professional being asked to testify in a court as a fact witness or even as an expert witness. These courses handle all of the important legal aspects, but nowhere did we have a course that can prepare you for the communications aspects of this work.

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I have never seen such high quality training, distilled to a perfected message, and compressed into a timeframe that any organization should willingly commit employee time to taking as a risk reduction strategy.- Jim Richards III